ɖʀʊӄքǟ ӄʊռʟɛʏ 🇧🇹🇹🇩@kunley_drukpa
REPLACEMENT MIGRATION IN BRAZIL 🇧🇷
Is always interesting how perennial a problem some version of ‘Replacement Migration’ is worldwide. In large non-core western countries like China or Brazil it often takes the form of (ethnic) internal migration from poorer regions to wealthier industrial metropoles. China, because of its authoritarian government, has been able to manage a lot of this migration with its own internal passport - or Hukou (户口) - system, mostly funnelling the migration where it is desired to emerging manufacturing centres like Shenzhen or Dongguan where the (cheap) labour is needed
Brazil, as a democracy, is not as able to exercise internal controls in the same way. The pattern that has emerged in recent decades then is the large-scale movement of people from poorer lower human capital regions - especially the Northeast - to the South East and South
Via Grok:
Southeast total: ~6.36 million Northeast-born
• São Paulo: 4,628,959 (by far the largest single destination)
• Rio de Janeiro: 1,149,692
• Minas Gerais: 384,659
• Espírito Santo: 197,558
South total: ~290,000 Northeast-born
• Paraná: 200,074
• Santa Catarina: 59,273
• Rio Grande do Sul: 30,634
For context, other notable destinations in 2010 included Pará (~725k, North), Goiás (~676k, Center-West), and the Federal District (~602k). The Southeast attracted the vast majority of long-term Northeast migrants
Most of this happens for obvious economic reasons, the pay and quality of life in the south is generally better than in the north, even if in the worst case as a migrant you end up living somewhere favela-adjacent in say São Paulo or Rio. Anecdotally I have met some people from these regions working in the south who “fly back to see their family twice a year”
Demographic change in São Paulo is instructive in this way. In the early 1960s, as the Military Dictatorship began, the percentage of São Paulo that was of mostly European ancestry was close to 70%. (Note São Paulo has a large Asian population too, famously over a million (now increasingly mixed) Japanese.) In 2022 at the last census that European % was about 54%. A lot of this change has been due to Pardo and Black migration - their shares rose significantly due to internal migration from the Northeast (which has higher mixed / Afro-descendant populations) as well as urbanisation, mixing and changing self-identification. Brazil drops its share of mostly European heritage Brazilians by about 10% every couple of decades anyway but the internal migration has the effect of concentrating this more visibly in southern cities. Interesting to note that Brazilians from the south will sometimes make the claim that replacement migration has the same kinds of attendant social, cultural, political and economic effects it is reported as having in the west. YMMV how much you want to buy into those claims!
